General Questions

I have just been elected a Committer, so what I should do now?

Read the Guide for new committers. That guide
is also useful for existing committers, and provides links to other sources
of information.

What Is PlanetApache?

Planet Apache aggregates RSS feeds
from Apache committers. It is run by the ASF and committers with blogs are
welcome to add their own blog to its feed. See the contents of the committers/planet directory in the
private repository.

What Is ApacheCon?

The Apache Software Foundation periodically organizes
conferences focusing on software developed at
Apache and on the way that Apache develops its software. Learn about what's
happening at Apache, hack code and meet the faces associated with the
names!

What Is A Hackathon?

A face-to-face gathering for hacking of code. Hackathons are generally held at ApacheCons, as well as at other times.

What Is An Infrathon?

A face-to-face gathering for work on Apache infrastructure by our amazing infra contractors and volunteers.

How do I manage my volunteer energy?

Heed the warnings in these two email threads (read them all the way
through): What is a
member
and
volunteeritis.
The discussion is about what it means to be a committed person at the ASF
and how to deal with your internal pressure that arises from such
dedication.

We each need to re-read those two important messages from time-to-time and
remind our communities.

How do I start a new project in the ASF?

Or move a project into the ASF?

Please contact the Incubator Project. They
will assist you in starting projects or moving them into the ASF.

What are the responsibilities of a Committer?

Note: this is an incomplete collection and not authoritative.

As an Apache volunteer, you have the right to set your own priorities and
do the work that scratches your own itch. As a Committer, you have a
responsibility to the community to help create a product that will outlive
the interest of any particular volunteer (including yourself). This means,
for example, that the code that you commit should be clear enough that
others not involved in its current development will be able to maintain and
extend it. It also means that you are responsible for helping to grow and
maintain the health of the Apache community.

More specific responsibilities of Committers include:

Deciding on release plans and releases

A prime responsibility of the Committers is to decide when a branch of
code is ready for release. A release is not to be taken lightly; each
release must uphold the Apache tradition of quality. Each Project
Management Committee formally authorizes the distribution of releases
to the public.

Applying patches

In order to grow and maintain healthy communities, committers need to
discuss, review and apply patches submitted by volunteers. The
Committers are also responsible for the quality and IP clearance of
the code that goes into ASF repositories.

Helping users

Committers should monitor both the dev and user lists for the projects
that they work on and (collectively) provide prompt and useful
responses to questions from users.

Monitoring commits and issues

Committers should review commit email messages for their projects and
point out anything that looks funny or that may bring in IP issues.
Monitoring Bugzilla / Jira for bugs or enhancement requests is also a
responsibility of Committers.

Helping out with the web site

The main Apache web site and the project web sites are in constant
need of maintenance. The Committers on a project are expected to
collectively maintain the project's web site. The Apache Committers as
a whole share the responsibility to maintain the main Apache site.

Is there a set term for acting as a Committer? Will I have to be elected again?

No - committer status and merit never expires. If you become inactive for a time (usually six months
or more) your account may be deactivated for security reasons. Most
projects allow reactivation of committer status by application to the pmc.

Some projects use the concept of a emeritus committer status. This is
typically suitable for those committers who can no longer they can give the
time they feel is required.

How Do I Bring Code Developed Outside Apache To An Existing Project?

For any substantial codebase that has been developed outside the ASF, a
small amount of process is required before the code can be committed. This
is managed by the Incubator. The first step
is to contact your PMC.

Infrastructure, Website, and Technical Questions

How do I make infrastructure requests?

You might notice something that needs changing, for example the
configuration for a mailing list. The request to the infrastructure@ list
or the apmail@ alias needs to come from your Project Management Committee.
That ensures that the requests are official, and not just an individual
user's desire. This is the same for all requests for infrastructure
changes. However, please try to get your PMC to assist first. There are
many things that the PMC or PMC chair can do, thereby easing the load on
the infrastructure team.

What does the Infrastructure Team use for communicating with the public?

Infrastructure has the infrastructure-dev@ mailing list to discuss new
infrastructure developments at the ASF. For service downtime announcements
and current information on operations, we use
http://twitter.com/infrabot. For general
announcements regarding services and the like, infrastructure has a
blog.

What hosts/machines at Apache do I have access to?

What can (and can't) I do on those machines?

You have a shell account and can publish a small personal website, as described
elsewhere. You must never store
secret/private keys (the private half of an SSH keypair, or a PGP private key) on any
ASF machines.

Help, I Forgot My Password!

Nexus (repository.apache.org) locked me out trying to stage an RC

Nexus is LDAP based auth. If you have changed your LDAP password recently it is possible
you have a cached version of your old password stored , perhaps in a settings.xml file
locally. Maven makes repeated attempts to try this authorization and within 10 seconds
you might find your LDAP account locked as a result.

Try accessing another LDAP based service to test the theory and if you cant get access
you can bet that is what happened.

The cure is to go to https://id.apache.org/reset/enter and reset your LDAP password to
clear the locked account. Change any cached creds locally and try staging to Nexus again.

Version Control Questions

Why Do I Get An Authorization Failure When Accessing SVN?

The most common reason is that you've forgotten your password!

The password used for subversion is the same as the password you use
for access to people.apache.org. You will not be prompted to enter it
frequently. This makes it is easy to forget.

Apache employs a number of different HTTP authentication realms. You will
need to enter your password whenever you access a new realm. (Subversion
prints information about the realm when you are prompted for the password.)

Of course, it is also possible that you're accessing an url which is
restricted. That's probably for a good reason so unless you know that you
should have access, don't bother the infrastructure team.

When Do I Need To Use svn lock?

Where Can I Find More Information?

Mail Questions

How do I setup my Apache email account?

How do I subscribe to a mailing list?

If it is a public list, email the -subscribe address (such as
dev-subscribe@httpd.apache.org) from the address you want subscribed, and
reply to the confirmation mail.

Private lists use the same procedure, but it's recommended to use the
self-subscribe app instead;
that avoids needing to wait for the human moderators to check and green-light
your subscription request.

At the time of writing the self-subscribe app lets ASF
Members subscribe to any ASF list (see
<../foundation/governance/members> for the rationale behind this) and other
committers to subscribe to a few foundation-wide lists. Notably, committers
who wish to subscribe to other lists (such as a private@ list of their project)
should still email the -subscribe address.

How do I request the creation of a new mail list?

Mail lists are the virtual room where the communities live, form and grow.
It is wiser to keep the number of mail lists per codebase the smallest
possible to allow the community to reach that critical mass that is
necessary to bootstrap a codebase and keep it in good shape.

At the same time, as communities grow, the need for more specialized mail
lists appears. This is the suggested chain of actions to request the
creation of a new mail list:

Request a vote in the community

If the creation is accepted, your Project Management Committee needs to
send in a request (more details ).

WARNING: the creation of a user mail list can be a very dangerous thing
for a community if the developers don't pay attention to their users and if
users don't have developers that reply to their emails. Sure, active
developers should expect a well behaving user community to reply to one
another for simple questions, but this doesn't happen overnight and the
creation of a user mail list alone can turn into a very harmful change.

How do I find out who is subscribed to a mailing list?

Moderators can send an email to:

listname-list@tlp.apache.org

Anyone with
access to the apmail account can run the following command to get a count
of the subscribers.

ezmlm-list~/lists/project/listname| wc -l

Remember that
there often are people subscribed to the digest version
too:

~lists/project/listname/digest

However,
most committers do not have access to apmail. See the notes in the
"committers" SVN module at /docs/resources.txt for another way.

Moderation: How do I request changes for moderators?

File an INFRA Jira ticket or ask your PMC to send a request to the apmail@ alias (apache.org)

If you have access to apmail, you can just change the list of subscribers
to list/mod. For example for the mod_perl dev list that is in

~apmail/lists/perl.apache.org/dev/mod/

Use ezmlm-list , ezmlm-sub and ezmlm-unsub to do that.

To determine who the existing moderators are, any committer can use the
technique described in the "committers" SVN module at /docs/resources.txt

Moderation: what should I do with "MODERATE" emails.

First look in the mail and check if it is spam (or other severely misguided
mail). If it is spam then just ignore the mail to have it silently dropped
after 5 days. To bounce non-spam with a notice to the sender, reply to the
-reject address in the mail header. If you wish to include a comment
with the rejection, the body of the message should look like this:

%%% Start comment
Your message goes here...
%%% End comment

If it is legitimate mail from a non-subscriber (or someone sending with a
different envelope sender than the one subscribed), reply to the moderate
request to the -accept address. If you also send mail to the -allow
address (i.e. reply to all) then future postings from that address will be
allowed through automatically.

If there is no -allow address in the moderate requests the list was
misconfigured when it was setup and you should contact
apmail@apache.org and get them to enable remote
administration.

See the EZMLM "Moderator's and Administrator's
Manual". You can also send email to {listname}-help@tlp.apache.org from
your moderation address (there are extra details for moderators).

Some lists are only open to ASF committers. The moderators have methods to
ensure that subscribers are committers, so subscribers can use whatever
email address that they want. Moderators see the tips described in the
"committers" SVN module at /docs/resources.txt

Moderation: dealing with problem posts

If you have a troublesome poster, then you can un-subscribe them from the
list using

{listname}-unsubscribe-badboy=menace.com@tlp.apache.org

(and send a courtesy email to them).

Occasionally you will get someone with a poorly-configured spam filter
sending automated replies to the list. You can deny their postings using

{listname}-deny-subscribe-badposter=menace.com@tlp.apache.org

(and send a courtesy email to them).

If someone (an unsubscribed user) was added to the moderation list
(intentionally or unintentionally) and now they are sending spam to
the list, you can remove them by sending an email to:

{listname}-allow-unsubscribe-badposter=menace.com@tlp.apache.org

Note that to see a list of who is allowed to post on the moderation list
you can send an email to:

{listname}-allow-list@tlp.apache.org

All of these must be sent from your moderator address. You can tell if
you're sending from the right address by emailing the -help address (e.g.,
dev-help@tlp.apache.org) and checking if the subject of the reply contains
the word "Moderator help".

Moderation: dealing with "MODERATE" requests for SPAM

If the content of the MODERATE request is clearly SPAM, then the simplest solution
is just to delete the request. (Do not reject it).

However, if you are receiving a lot of such requests, it may perhaps be worth taking
additional action.

Some SPAM mails have an opt-out link.
Whether this will actually do anything useful is another matter, but it might be worth
trying if the spam seems to be from a legitimate business.
To avoid revealing your personal IP address, you may wish to use an anonymising service such as Tor.

If the SPAM mails are all sent from the same address (*),
then try adding them to the 'deny' list:

{listname}-deny-subscribe-badposter=menace.com@tlp.apache.org

(*) Note that the sender address can be extracted from the Cc: address in the moderation request.
This has the form:

The sender e-mail address is contained between the first '-' (hyphen) and the '@' sign.
This is already in the correct form for use in the 'deny' subscription request, i.e. the '@' has been changed to '='.

I didn't forward my mail before. How can I download my old mail?

When there is no .forward file then mail builds up in the Mailbox of
your people.apache.org home directory. This is a bad thing. Sooner or
later, all that mail will need to be downloaded.

Here is presented a simple method to move the mail from people.apache.org
into a Thunderbird mail
client. Copy the mailbox from your people.apache.org directory to your
local machine. For example:

$ scpUSER@people.apache.org:/home/USER/Mailbox/tmp/Mailbox

And then copy it into your Thunderbird Mail folder. For example:

$ mv/tmp/Mailbox "thunderbird/profile/Mail/LocalFolders"

The name of the directory might differ depending on your Thunderbird
version and configuration.

Are Apache projects really always free to download and use?

How Should I Apply Patches From A Contributor?

You need to make sure that the commit message contains at least the name of
the contributor and ideally a reference to the Bugzilla or JIRA issue where
the patch was submitted. The reasons: this preserves the legal trail and
makes sure that contributors are recognized. Obviously, the latter doesn't
mean it's not a good idea to list the names of all contributors somewhere
on the website. To make it easier to "grep" for commits with patches from
contributors, always use the same pattern in the commit message.
Traditionally, we use "Submitted by: <name>" or "Obtained from:
<name>".

The first is that it has to arrive in the hands of an Officer of the ASF.
For emailed and faxed documents, this is quick. For snail mailed documents,
this is sometimes slow and often very slow if posted from outside the US.

The second is that the document has to be acknowledged by the ASF
Secretary. Acknowledged documents are noted in the appropriate file in the
foundation repository.

The third stage is waiting until you know that the ASF has registered the
document. ASF members can watch the commit records or check the file.
PMC members can watch their private@ list for a notice from secretary@ (this
only happens if the ICLA mentioned which TLP to notify) .
Others will need to wait until Jim's
page is regenerated from
that file and so they may experience an additional delay.

How can I report issues with Apache brand or trademark use?

PMCs are responsible for managing their own Apache project brands, and committers
are encouraged to assist. If you spot any potential misuse or infringement of
Apache brands or trademarks by third parties, please follow our
Apache Trademark Use Reporting Guidelines.